I recently discovered a very obscure Soviet game console called the "SKB Kontur Krokha" (translated in English) that i didn't knew existed (Hey, better late than never) which came out in Russia in 1990. This game console as only 200 consoles ever released and were given to employees of the manufacture.
If you poke around the net, you can find a lot of information but mostly in Russian.
(picture from: http://alemorf.ru/comps/kroha/index.html)
One of the best place to find many pictures of the console, inside it and screenshots of games, just go to the upper URL mentioned under the picture.
You can also find schematics of this unique game console and also an emulator (err...multi-emulator actually) done by the same author of the web site: Aleksey Morozov (aka alemorf).
So after finding his emulator, i've spent a few hours translating the bios (game1.rom) in English the best i could as sometimes you don't have much space to hack names and here's some screenshots:
This all been done with Google translation and a hex editor, simple as that...oh and a few hours to spare. ;P
As i have uploaded the translated bios, i have noticed that it was already added to the MAME as version 0.210 (May 2019), so i have tried out MAME:
And replaced the translated bios in the zip file, and...
Works like a charm! :)
So if anyone wants to play the "Kpoxa" in English, you can download the file HERE.
This was a nice change of pace from my OdySim project, been quite a time i haven't used an Hex editor. So have fun folks! :)
Good thing Sly! Very interesting. Thanks to this post i learned that this machine existed. Now you made me desire for more Elektronika handhelds in MAME (specifically the original titles "Autoslalom" and "Merry Arithmetics")!
ReplyDeleteHey! Hi JDGP030302! Been quite a while since the last time we wrote to each other. Sorry about the very late reply, been so much busy since this summer that many projects has been "on hold".
ReplyDeleteI hope that MAME will add more VFD handhelds in their upcoming versions as i think these are the best handhelds ever made. I should be continuing the OdySim soon and have many new games for it since summer and other things. :)